Improve the catalog experience on newly created apps

Feature Suggestion

When doing npx @backstage/create-app as is recommended, the out-of-the-box catalog experience is_very_ barebones. Only Component and API kinds have dedicated views, and only service and website component types are handled.

This should be much richer and have more useful views out of the box.

Possible Implementation

The template source for the entity page is here. It should at least be much closer to the example app page here.

User and Group pages should use the org plugin.

Ideally the switch at the bottom should explicitly mention every single kind in the core model - including things like Template, for example - even if they are rendering the default view like before.

[freben]

As mentioned in Discord - yeah, that indeed looks like a broken release. If you want to get unblocked quick, you could perhaps clone this repo and use yarn backstage-create-app from within it.

[freben]

@freben I had a look at it and made few changes in EntityPage.tsx file present under templates/default-app folder. Then tried to run npx @backstage/create-app to test the changes. But, changes made are not reflected in the new app created. Not able to figure out why. Any idea why it’s happening?

You can run yarn backstage-create-app to run it directly - check the node_modules/.bin folder and you’ll see the backstage scripts with their local names. They support being run “locally” (taking into account local code changes instead of using the remote)